Kalpana Kotagal has been advocating for the underserved for her entire career. She also happened to come up with a way for stars to leverage their power.

Kalpana Kotogal can vividly recall the first moment she felt the slap of racial discrimination. “I was probably 9 or 10 years old, definitely old enough to have a sense of race,” she says. At a now-defunct pizza place in Cincinnati in the 1980s, where she and her family were “decidedly brown,” they waited (and waited) in the...